The Bush administration is continuing its destructive environmental policies according to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on waters and wetlands and newly proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations that would allow power plants to pollute more.
The GAO report found that over the past four years the United States has cut back its protection of wetlands and waterways as the US Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA have scaled back their jurisdiction over waterways and wetlands since 2001. The Bush administration’s response to a United States Supreme Court ruling in 2001 that the Army Corps of Engineers has exceeded its authority by seeking jurisdiction of waters based on the presence of birds contributed to the problem and a joint 2003 memorandum from the Corps and the EPA that scaled back the definition of “waters of the United States” to exclude almost all non-navigable waters have been responsible for the cuts in protections. Under the Clean Water Act, the discharge of dredged or fill material into the “waters of the United States” is prohibited, but determining jurisdiction depends on how the phrase is defined. A significant portion of the waters of the United States are no longer protected from development, with Texas estimating that 79% of its rivers and streams are no longer subject to federal regulations.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration yesterday proposed new EPA regulations that will allow power plants to release more pollutants. The regulations would affect the 600 coal-burning power plants in the United States by allowing them to release more pollutants into the air provided they “modernize” in order to operate for more hours. The Bush administration believes that the new regulations would spur improvements in pollution control technologies, despite the fact that the EPA’s own data shows that most power plants on the east coast would not install pollution controls for sulfur dioxide until 2015. Coal-burning power plants currently produce millions of tons of pollutants that cause acid rain, smog, soot, and respiratory problems, as well as releasing large quantities of mercury.
